CARLTON FLETCHER: Todd Gurley suspension made by NCAA hypocrites

Forget about your woman and that water can. Today you’re working for the man.

— Roy Orbison

Let me preface this by stating, flatly, that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a University of Georgia football fan. I’ve told the story of why in this space before — we’ll just recap by pointing out it was the results of a personal encounter with then-Georgia assistant coach Ray Goff and leave it at that.

But I join the howling mob of UGA fans who cry foul over the suspension Thursday of all-world Bulldog running back Todd Gurley for — and you can picture me shaking my head in disbelief as I type this — selling copies of his autograph.

For those who don’t keep up — or who have been on another planet the last month or so — Gurley is a phenomenal football player. The Dogs were 4-1 before Gurley’s suspension, and no doubt would have been 5-0 and probably ranked No. 1 in the nation had head coach Mark Richt and offensive coordinator Mike Bobo (a Thomasville boy and a really good guy) not forgotten that Gurley was on their team when Georgia played South Carolina.

In his five games, Gurley — used way too sparingly for most fans’ armchair quarterbacking — rushed for 773 yards and scored 10 touchdowns. Some of his more memorable runs were of the jaw-dropping variety.

When word surfaced that Gurley was accepting money from memorabilia dealers for his red-hot autograph, Richt and UGA acted swiftly. They suspended the running back indefinitely while the NCAA conducts an investigation into the matter.

The NCAA (Nobody Can Auction Autographs?) rules over college athletics with an iron fist, suspending athletes — many of them from poor families and with little spending cash when they arrive on campus at good ole State U — left and right for rules that range from the merely nonsensical to the down-right hypocritical. The Gurley suspension ranks among the latter.

NCAA Rule 12.5.2.1 prohibits college athletes from making money for promoting commercial merchandise, including merchandise to which athletes affix their name. The NCAA’s reason: They don’t want their student-athletes exploited.

Really?

Do they mean like falling under the umbrella of an organization that signs multibillion-dollar TV contracts (CBS has a $3.2 billion deal with the Southeastern Conference — to which Georgia belongs — alone!) and then policing the athletes to make sure they don’t profit from their talents? Because, to me, the NCAA is doing nothing if it’s not exploiting the men and women responsible for those multibillion-dollar TV contracts.

The organization justifies the hypocrisy of its bylaws by proclaiming its member institutions are more than compensating their student-athletes by giving (most) a free education in return for their talents. Tell that to a hungry kid who works out hours a day for his school’s athletic team and can’t afford to pay his way into a club to blow off steam after the week of hard work. A kid who can’t take his girlfriend for a ride because his family can’t afford to buy him a vehicle, who can’t buy new clothes because there’s no wiggle room in his limited budget.

Up until they took it off the university’s big-money merchandise shelves, an authentic UGA jersey sporting Gurley’s No. 3 was going for a hefty $135. That’s just one way the university funds its athletic program, which reportedly took in just south of $100 million last year.

You’d better bet Richt and his fellow SEC coaches are doing all right by their star athletes as well. The UGA head man is making a cool $3.2 million a year.

Yes, if things play out the way they’re going, Todd Gurley stands to make a whole lot of money in the National Football League. He’s already being projected as a possible No. 1 draft pick, and that means a contract even more lucrative than Richt’s. And greed most assuredly had something to do with his attempts to profit from his autograph despite well-publicized cases where former star teammate A.J. Green and Heisman Trophy-winning Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel earned their own degrees of hot water for doing the same thing.

But for the NCAA — and the University of Georgia — to righteously proclaim they’re preserving the integrity of their institutions and protecting their athletes from exploitation is a steaming pile of hogwash and hooey. What these storied institutions do, actually, is subject their athletes to slave labor, using them to collect millions upon billions of dollars and ruling over them with an iron fist, lest they try to do what any other kid their age would do … enjoy at least a little bit of the college experience.

Email Carlton Fletcher at carlton/[email protected].